While a liberal theology may or may not bear little trace of Christian experience, a positive Gospel, Forsyth contends is ‘given as a power to our Christian experience’. It is at bottom a theology of conversion, and not of being merely academically convinced. With echoes of Anselm, Forsyth avers that Positive theology is ‘faith giving a reasonable account of itself; it is not reason shaping, amending, or licensing faith … Its datum is in history, not in thought. It has the stigmata of the Cross on its heart’. While Liberal theology is doctrinaire, dogmatic, intellectualist and concerned with truth, Positive theology is more devout, pneumatic, evangelical and moral. Liberal concerned with life; the liberal is more doctrinaire and concerned with truth. The latter is ‘part of the religion’, the former, ‘a view of the religion’.
[The image comes from another Anselm, Anselm Kiefer, and depicts his 2007 work, ‘The Five Wise Virgins’]
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Hi Jason – two things. First, the Holman Hunt exhibition was a remarkable and moving encounter with several paintings known and unknown that demonstrate the importance of exegesis through art. I’ll blog about this when my emotional dust settles.
Second, re the five virgins both foolish and wise. I heard an open air preacher on Paisley High Street roaring the story about five foolish virgins and warning those who passed by not to be like said five foolish virgins. I was left wondering what people with no biblical framework, steeped in secular discourse and immersed in a culture awash with sexual idiom, would make of the word ‘virgin’ (wise or otherwise), as applied to them……mmmmmmmmm! Most people will associate the word (not the concept) with Richard Branson, CD’s and trains I reckon.
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